Tackle crime as gendered

DR GABRIELLE JAMELA HOSEIN

A PUBLIC health approach to crime continues to float about without a clear anchor. At this point, we can only pray that security experts understand the intersections between gender and sexuality, and gangs, murders and the illegal economy.

While we must stem gun availability, we can’t ignore boys’ incentives to join gangs and choose "shooter" for a profession. This is not a problem that can be solved through sports or vocational training while leaving violence as a source of masculine status intact.

Responses should also be informed by how and why women become involved in criminal networks from spaces and in ways in which they exercise limited power. Regardless of how gangster women may be, these networks are ultimately and entirely male dominated.

Similarly, as community leaders, women play the role of community peacemakers, but their power is limited in comparison to national and transnational networks of crime. When men are spraying bullets, how does this exacerbate women’s relative powerlessness? As part of a public health approach, is addressing such gender inequality considered necessary?

The public should also note the Government’s failure to approve school curricula that improve awareness and prevention of gender-based violence among youth. The reason for such irresponsibility is rooted in gender and sexuality.

The State is choosing to leave children without information that can reduce societal violence to satisfy (primarily Christian) religious groups resistant to the health and family life curricula, which they wrongly believe promotes sexual activity and gender diversity. Gender and sexuality are hardly incidental to the responses the Government chooses, and a public health approach must recognise these connections.

Regarding murders, women are also impacted in gendered ways. For example, in terms of being killed by partners and ex-partners. Patrice Aaron, 30 years old and mother to two young children, was bludgeoned and strangled after months of physical abuse. She was killed on her daughter’s birthday, February 14. Her ex-partner, Simon Cova, 42, was charged for her murder.

Gabrielle Raphael, who just turned 25, was found in the Savannah on May 8. She had grown up without her mother and was herself mother to five children of different fathers, all under seven years old. She was unemployed because she suffered from seizures. Express reported that “she had been taken 'advantage of' since the age of 18.” This too is a story of gendered vulnerability.

Aneesa Vicky Ali, 33 years old, was last seen liming at a bar before she was found battered in a forest after being missing since March 29. No charges have been reported in the press. The fact that you can be alive today and dead tomorrow without explanation has women across the country terrified in a way that men simply don’t live with day to day.

Women are also being killed as part of long-standing disputes in which they are the target or collateral damage. On May 10, Asha Angelica George, 30, mother to two adolescent girls, was shot to death along with her partner Devon Drayton. Her 12-year-old daughter survived wounds to her head. Asha’s father shot and killed her mother in 1999, her partner G5 was shot dead at her home in 2018 and her house set on fire.

Family violence was part of her short life history, perhaps explaining her later trajectory, and the gendered vulnerabilities in her girls’ motherless future.

Similarly, Aneesa Ramkissoon, 26, was assassinated while kneeling in front of her three children, all under six years old. She was the target in a complex clash that has taken the lives of others, including a teenage boy.

Candace Griffith, 41, was killed at a birthday party on April 17. A 15-year-old girl was also shot in the leg, one woman was shot in the head and another, a grandmother, was shot in the mouth. None was an intended target. On April 10, Elizabeth Watson was killed when masked men in tactical uniforms shot at a house where she was liming, also hitting another woman.

Six-year-old Kylie Maloney was killed when men in camouflage shot at her house on January 8. Kenfentse Simmons, 30, and Aaron London, 25, were charged. On April 18 Kernella Saunders, 35, was killed by a stray bullet while at home. Another woman, 27 years old, identified as “Lashay” in the press, was also shot to death. The target, Lashay’s partner, escaped. Innocent girls and women are collateral damage of men’s fighting in such ways.

As we mourn Gabrielle Raphael, it’s necessary we remember, crime and violence are always gendered.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 505

motheringworker@gmail.com